


icarus falls in love with the sun

by foxbones



Category: The L Word
Genre: F/F, and jenny bc she's dead, happy pride 2018 from me to you, kind of a shane character study if you want, spoilers for the entire show i suppose, the whole gang's here! except for max bc the plot destroyed him, this is the way that we live
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-08 02:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15233088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxbones/pseuds/foxbones
Summary: Shane tries to outrun everything in the desert. Carmen can keep up, even if it's only in her dreams.And then the dream is reality, and they are what they are.a post-series fic.





	1. sand

**Author's Note:**

> hoo boy, did this ever happen. like a sledgehammer to the head and a train to the gay heart, this happened.
> 
> happy pride 2018 to my beautiful homosexual family. i was a baby lesbian who came of age with the l word (shout out to lonely summer nights as a closeted teen in a small-ass town watching episodes of this problematic hot mess of a tv show and feeling like these people were my FRIENDS) and fully acknowledge that it is a trainwreck of a television show, but i have feelings about it, damn it, and they're always with me. so consider this my gift to you, especially those of you who also feel attached to this problematic fave trash heap from their baby gay days.
> 
> also, i'm coming out! as someone who has way too many feelings about shane! she is more than the provider of bare-chested sex scenes, y'all! she is a complex self-destructive fragile idiot and i'm protecting her! stop making her into a sex punchline! i'm defensive!
> 
>  
> 
> disclaimer: max doesn't exist at this point in the show's universe. why? because in my headcanon, loving max who just wanted to be okay and not be tangled up in these hot mess lives of these hot mess people moved out of jenny and shane's house, got a great loft apartment where he could work remotely as a programmer, and enjoys the company of whoever he wants and they're kind to him! they listen! they're not transphobic! and he doesn't talk to these hot messes anymore, he is free of their bullshit.
> 
> also jenny wasn't murdered. she killed herself in bette and tina's pool. look, the girl would.
> 
> for those of you who are like, wow, this messy gay bitch just started another unfinished fic she wont finish for five thousand years, joke's on you because i already wrote the whole thing, saw how long the insane thing was, and decided to split it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the desert 

I saw a creature, naked, bestial, 

Who, squatting upon the ground, 

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it. 

I said, “Is it good, friend?” 

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; 

 

“But I like it 

“Because it is bitter, 

“And because it is my heart.”

 

\- in the desert, stephen crane

 

 

 

 

 

Get up, keep moving. You’re good at this. You’ve always been good at this. Tilt that head up, take those shallow breaths, and you can tread water for hours. Water being life, the long dark truth of it. Hours being years, if you really try. Surrender to distractions if it helps. Anything to keep the axis spinning.

No one was surprised when you disappeared after the burial. Her family sat shiva and you all waited on the periphery, and you were already feeling the tightness, the itch, in between the times you couldn’t get your head up for the crying. They put her in the ground and you knew your cue. There was a time when it would have been out of character, back before you missed your own wedding and set out to ruin everything you could get your hands on. Now it’s par for the course. You love your friends. You loved Jenny, too, but isn’t that the perfect little cliche of it? Another angsty lesbian who fucks all her friends and fucks them over, too. What you love will leave you, right? If it’s not already on the way out, you make sure to break your own ankles to give it a running start.

Rent the car. Don’t tell Alice - she’ll find out anyway, you’ll have thirty missed calls and voicemails and texts, even though texts aren’t really a thing yet, but Alice is sending emails from three different accounts, Alice will send determined gay bloodhounds if she has to. Bette could keep a secret, but not Tina, so not Bette. Helena, Kit, they’d guilt you into staying if you let slip. Tasha would stay out of it. Jenny wouldn’t mind or else she wouldn’t have exited the world knowing exactly where it would leave you. But Jenny wasn’t okay. Jenny wasn’t okay, and that’s why she did that, and that’s not your fault. But it could be your fault. It’s not, but it could be. Carmen would have said…Carmen would have…

Rent the car.

Don’t think about what Carmen would have said. Rent the car.

Even if you know Carmen would have taken one look at you and --

Rent the car. Point the car in the opposite direction of the ocean. Drive until your chest stops hurting. Sleep when you want to sleep. Wake when you want to wake. The desert doesn’t know you or want to know you, the desert might as well hate your guts for all it cares, it’s enough to make you fall in love right there. You could blush at its indifference. Don’t stall, though. Get up, keep moving. You’re a professional. Professional cliche.

  
  
  
  


 

 

But you’ll run out of money, and you know that. And you’re only good at two things: people pleasing and hair. And skating, kind of. That’s sad. You’ll laugh into a beer about that. Laugh to yourself. You’re learning to keep your own company now. The man next to you is too drunk to realize you’re not a teenage boy. He keeps bugging the bartender about serving underage kids. If he knew the truth, he’d be a lot less happy, you think. You almost let him in on the secret of your actual self. Slide your ID down the bar at him, grin expectantly. Dare him to hate you on the spot, beg for it with your silence. Hell, you’ll admit that you ache a little for a punch in the gut, a punch in the teeth. What you’d give for a swollen lip right now. Something to remind you of the floor falling out. You needed an airbag in LA. You needed a curb to the face. Some outside force like the fingertip of a god to reach down and smack the nerve back into you, make you love yourself enough not to fuck yourself over.

But he leaves you alone. Fate’s not looking to give you an intervention tonight. You walk back to your motel. You listen to the drone of the highway, not too far off. You listen to the couple in the next room cry and screw and laugh and screw. You listen to the flies colliding with the light bulb in the lamp beside the bed. One by one, they fall stunned, buzzing awake, rising back up to their doom. Mistaking the lamp for some celestial body. But what would they have done if they were right? Died on the surface, over and over again? Who are you to judge? A girl once smiled and you thought it was the sun. You burned every day and nothing could ever beat it.

  
  
  
  


 

 

The older woman at the gas station likes you. She reaches over the divider, puts her gum in the receptacle next to your car.

“Hi,” she says.

You lift a few fingers from the wheel. “Hey.”

“Out for a drive?”

“Kind of.”

She walks around the front of your car, walks so you can see the full measure of her, and she’s wearing jeans that are tight enough for it to stir you in the old way, has her shirt tied at her waist and her bra’s black under that, she’s leaning over so you can see. You take it all in because it’s what you do, it’s how you know before you know. “California plates.”

“That’s where I started.”

“And where are you headed?”

“Not sure. Figuring it out as I go.”

She lowers her sunglasses. “You’re kidding.”

“Afraid not.”

“So you’re just driving across the country without a destination.”

“Guess so.”

“You having some kind of breakdown?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Huh.”

There was a time when this would have been easy. You wouldn’t have needed to say much, because she was already trying to get you to ask, and she’d have slid into the passenger seat, would have told you where to drive and you’d go because she wanted something from you, and this was what happened when someone wanted something from you, anything from you: you gave it to them. You never refused. You had never been able to form yourself in an image that belonged to yourself. You had shaped this Shane, this form you took, around the wants of others, around someone’s desire for you to fill their needs. What were you worth if you couldn’t fill them? Someone wanted you to fuck them. Someone wanted you to save them. Someone wanted you to take care of them. Someone wanted you to fill a role that would make their life easier. Jenny wanted you to be complicit in her own reality. She wanted you to make her feel desired and grounded. She wanted you to accept her, take her in when she’d worked her ass off to push everyone else out. And you gave, and you gave, and you gave, and you gave, and you gave, and you gave, and you gave. You gave and it still wasn’t enough.

The woman’s smile is taking that shape you already know. Her teeth are playing at her bottom lip and you’ve seen it before, you can see exactly how it’s going to go. “You want company on this non-breakdown?”

You run your hands over the steering wheel. Something in you stings to life, wakes up and starts itching at the raw want that’s standing next to your car.

“Sorry,” you say. “It’s a solo trip.”

“I get it. Some things you’ve got to do by yourself.” The woman smirks. “Any chance you could give me a ride home? I’m only a few miles from here. Hot day to walk.”

“How’d you get here?”

She gestures behind her, a car idling in front of the gas station, a man’s hand extended out the window with a smoking cigarette between his fingers. “Someone I don’t want to go home with. He’s getting on my nerves.”

“He gonna like it if you get in my car?”

“He’s the one who told me to walk home.”

“I don’t want any trouble, honestly.”

“He’ll be happy you took me off his hands.” The woman drags a finger over her left breast, once, twice. “Cross my heart.”

Your mouth tastes stale. Your foot is jiggling. You unlock the passenger side.

  
  
  
  


 

 

You crash with her for a week. She’s got a fold-out couch and about ten fans propped up in each room. She kisses you once, the first time she unlocks her front door, the first time she lets you in because she’s asked you to come up: you step past her and she catches your face with her hand, presses her mouth to yours so quick and so hard that you can feel the perspiration above her upper lip, and instantly you’re conscious of the sweat on your lower back and the thick miserable heat you’d been keeping out with your car’s AC. Your stomach curdles at the sensation, of the heat on your skin and the wetness on your lips, a first.

“Sorry,” you say, turning away. “Look, you’re gorgeous, I’m really sorry, honestly, I’m sorry--”

And she shakes her head, lets out a bark of a laugh. “Why are you apologizing? Christ, what’d you do, invent boundaries yesterday?”

You look at her. You feel like whatever you’ve been holding upright in that chamber of your ribcage is about to fall right out. “Kind of.”

“Jesus, you’re serious.” She grabs you by the shoulders, grips them tight. “Sit down or something. I mean it, sit yourself right here.”

And you do, you sit down and you don’t get back up for six more nights. Her name is Beth. Her son calls her Bunny. He’s fifteen, comes over from his father’s house on the fifth day, wants to know what LA’s like.

“So the girls there are super hot, huh?”

You grin. A million memories flooding over. You’re on his level in that moment, you get that warmth in your chest like every teen boy who finally copped a feel. “Oh, yeah. Super hot.

“Okay, but they don’t all look like you, right? Because you kinda look like a guy, my dude.”

Bunny yells from the stove. He rolls his eyes. “Man, I’m not being offensive. She knows what she looks like.”

You laugh. You’ve been laughing these last couple of days, because Bunny’s really funny and she wanted to hear about what you’re doing leaving LA and now she wants to make you laugh, she keeps saying you ought to laugh more. “They don’t all look like me. Trust me.”

“You got a girlfriend there?”

Bunny yells again. Her son just keeps rolling his eyes, throwing up his hands.

“Jesus, Bunny, it’s fine! I’m not being offensive. She’s obviously a lesbian.”

You smoke with Bunny on her staircase, say things like “The moon’s so big out here”, or “You don’t have to put me up, I’m sorry.” And Bunny will catch your eye, shake her head when she laughs and blows out a column of smoke. Call you a broken record. She’s not wrong, no. She’s got you pegged pretty damn good.

She asks about your friends and you tell her about them, and you end up telling her more than you’ve told anyone outside of that group: how you came to them, how you’ve all slipped in and out of relationships and emotions and fights and one thing after the other. It doesn’t seem dramatic even when you’re spelling it all out but Bunny’s eyes keep widening, and she keeps putting out cigarettes only to pull out another one, lick her lips before setting them to it.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says after five days of these stories. “But your friends...you know, I don’t know that any of them are living particularly healthy lives. Some of them seem like bad people, to be perfectly honest with you.” She holds up her hands, the smoke trailing her right one. “Take it with a grain of salt. Just an outsider’s opinion.”

You don’t say anything for a minute. Look at the parking lot, the busy road, the desert beyond that. All these lives you aren’t a part of, human and animal, right down to the cactus flowers.

“I don’t really have a family anymore. My friends are my family.” You exhale. “You know what they say about families.”

You can feel her eyes on you, but you don’t look. Keep staring at that red haze in the distance.

“Yeah,” she says. “Nobody’s perfect, I guess.”

“That’s right. Nobody’s perfect.”

  
  
  


 

 

You leave on a Monday. Bunny writes her number down, tucks it in the pocket of your shirt. You leave cash on the table where she won’t find it until you’re gone, everything you owe for food and air and then some.

“You sure you wanna go?”

“I gotta get back on the road.”

“You were making it a little more exciting around here.

“By taking up your couch?”

“You’re good company,” she says. She kisses your cheek. “You’re a good person, Shane. I’m sure a lot of people tell you that, but I don’t know if it sticks. You’re good to have around.”

“Okay,” you say. You know what you’re supposed to do but don’t know if you can do it. “Thanks,” you say. Before you can get back into the car, you stop long enough to smile at her. “You know, you remind me of someone.”

Bunny pulls herself into a pose, makes a face. “Was she sexy? Like this?”

“She was beautiful.” Paige was always beautiful.

“Did you love her?”

“I wanted to.”

“That’s the worst kind of wanting. She wasn’t the one who fucked you up, though. Bet she wished she was, but someone else had gotten there first.” She smiles with her eyes, shakes her head. “You’re really something, you know that? I’m going to remember this week for a long time.” Bunny taps the hood of your car. “Drive safe, Shane.”

You try to put Nevada behind you, just like California. Nothing sticks.

  
  
  
  
  


 

In Utah, you start dreaming about Carmen like the fool you are. Like the damned miserable fool you have proven yourself to be.

It’s just that the sky is huge, and the land’s day-glo orange and it stretches out in every direction, all these shapes like fists and fingers pointing up to nowhere, all these patches of tourists and then patches of nothing. Something about it hits you. You think at first that maybe it reminds you of Texas, but your Texas never looked like this. Then you think about how it’s like nowhere you’ve ever been before, that things are finally striking you as unfamiliar, as strange, and you’ve made your life from familiar little pieces for so long that this might be what’s shaken you up. You’ve never been alone for the strangeness. You start thinking about being alone, and who you’d rather be with, who ought to be here with you now, maybe.

So you close your eyes in those motels, and when you open them in your dreams, you see Carmen.

“Really,” she says, wrapped in your sheets. “You think it’s going to be this easy? You think I’m going to show up and smile all sweet and act like you never fucked this up?”

“Please,” you say

“Is this what you’re going to do for the rest of your life? Have one nice woman after the other try to fix you until you use up their kindness? You think I’m going to be another casualty after all this time?”

“Please,” you say.

“Did I ever give you the impression I was the forgiving type?”

“Please,” you say.

“Fuck you,” she says. Stands up. Drops the sheets to the floor. Walks out of the room, but the room’s fading and it’s nothing but bright light surrounding the rear view of her, and isn’t that just fucking perfect?

You prop up your pillow. You watch her go. You grin, maybe, if you can grin in a dream.

  
  
  
  


 

 

Sometimes you dream about Jenny, too, but those aren’t good dreams. Jenny in her own blood. Jenny in the pool. Jenny’s eyes too big for her head. Jenny choking, Jenny spitting up something that isn’t water and isn’t air, Jenny laughing in a way that makes you nauseous.

You half expect to turn and see her ghost these days. Sometimes you’re surprised she’s not haunting that passenger seat, leaning over you when you wake up in the morning. She’d be the type to come back with a vengeance. Not for you, of course. Her soft spot for you, that never faded, just leaked, sucked you in and it wasn’t always a good thing, no, you can admit that now.

“Okay, Jenny,” you say, when the car sputters a little. “I hear you.”

“Quit it, Jenny,” you say, when the door to your motel room sticks.

And when you swerve to miss that snake in the road, you figure that if you pulled over, turned to look, she’d be standing there holding the thing in her arms, wearing a tutu and Converse and whatever the fuck else, smirking at you.

You think this desert’s making you crazy. Maybe a little.

But you keep driving.

  
  
  


 

 

 

Here’s where things could devolve into something predictable. This could become a road trip type of story real fast, right? Angsty sexual deviant crosses country in rental car, discovers herself along the way, puts her broken pieces back together, realizes everything she ever needed was right at home the whole time. We’re halfway there, aren’t we? Okay, but you’re not going to do that. That’s not how it plays out this time.

You get the car that overheats while the Rockies are still a pretty little white promise on the horizon. You get the phone with no service and the cars that won’t stop unless it’s to slow down and chuck something at you once they realize you’re not some kid but in fact a grown woman. You get the tow truck and the driver who tells you about the time he found god in a shithouse. You get the payphone and the long distance call to Los Angeles.

“Look, I didn’t want to bother you, I don’t want you guys to drive out here, but I called you first because I knew Alice would freak out too much for me to get a word in--”

You get a Peabody private plane landing in SLC and a very nice rental to the joke of a town nearest to wherever the fuck in the Utah desert you happened to shut down and Bette Porter stepping out, brow furrowed, concern and slight disappointment and care and annoyance and exasperation and worry all rolled up there, the typical complex question of her ready to pick you up and sling you over her shoulder like she’s done with most other things.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Shane.”

  
  
  
  


 

 

You buy Bette lunch even though she glares at the plate of food and then glares at you, because you know, it’s the least you could do. You take a deep breath, like you could possibly cushion what you’re about to say, knowing perfectly well she’s about to bat it down in a single swift blow.

“For the record, I don’t want to come home.” You pause to breathe, register the change in her expression. “I just needed a ride outta there, I didn’t even think you’d--”

“You’re not fucking serious. I flew to fucking Utah to give you a _ride_?”

“I know you’re mad.”

“We thought you were fucking dead, Shane. You don’t leave a note. You don’t answer your phone. Helena was going to hire a private detective. Alice was going to call the FBI. Actually, I should call her now before she does that anyway.

“You won’t be able to do that. No service.”

Bette looks like she could throw you across the room. You don’t know if you want to give her the chance to try. “Oh, you give a fuck about service now? Now that someone’s actually physically come all the way out here to New Fucking Zion, you wanted to check if you could make a fucking call. That’s great, Shane.”

“Bette, I’m sorry.”

It’s right about now you realize you could have called Bunny. You could have hitchhiked. You could have walked. The second two options probably would have ended with your demise in the bare grave of the desert or some roadside ditch, but it might have been easier than this.

Bette sighs. Rubs her temples. She wore designer in this desert but if you know Bette you know it’s two seasons old and those sunglasses have been the victim of a teething toddler and anyway, you love her because she loved you enough not to bring the rest of them here. Spared you from the evisceration and totally overwhelming stifling mess that is inevitable. Not yet, she knew. She looks at you, finally makes eye contact, and you see just how exhausted she is. Your heart tumbles right out, smacks right onto the floor. You spectacular idiot.

“I’m so sorry,” you repeat, but she shakes her head.

“We love you, Shane. We already lost Jenny You gave us the impression we’d lost you, too. I know what you’re going through, we all do. Come be with us for this, please.”

“It’s just...it’s all kind of there, you know?”

“I’m aware.” Bette keeps getting these hard edges to her words and shit, you know you deserve those little snips they leave, but it doesn’t make them hurt less. “I was there, too. We all were.”

“I just don’t know if I can be there right now. The memories and all that. It’s still kind of raw, and I just...I don’t know if I can be there.”

Bette snorts. “It was my fucking pool. We all have to be there, Shane.”

You down your coffee. “You’ve never been this mad at me before.”

“You’ve never been this selfish before.”

All you got for her is a single breathy laugh, and the truth. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

Because here is the thing about you and Bette. There has always been an understanding between you two: you’ve both done things, bad things, fucking stupid things, things you regret. You recognized the potential for self-destruction in each other a long time ago. Could see the little seeds tucked away, not meant for the world to find, but no, when you know the tendency to ruin in yourself, you can smell it on someone else. So of course it was Bette who came out here. Of course it’s Bette who calls you out.

“Fucking hell,” Bette mutters, giving in, and then reaches over, pulls you into a fierce hug despite you both sitting on stools, despite the awkward tilt of your bodies.

“Uh, hey,” the line cook says, appearing at the end of the counter as if summoned by the night-quite-rightness of his patrons. “Hey, now.”

Alpha Bette snaps back to attention, looks up. “What?”

The line cook backs off a little. “Alright, alright. Nothing.”

“Are we offending you?”

You tap her wrist, trying to pull her back, knowing she’s way too on edge for this shit. “Bette--”

“No, I’m serious. Is there something that we’re doing that you take fucking issue with?”

He grunts. “Look, I don’t want trouble.”

“Who’s causing trouble? Please clarify who here is causing trouble.”

“I’m just asking you to keep your voices down.”

Bette makes a face, gestures around the near-empty dining room of the diner. “For who? The only other patron is sleeping.”

“Look,” he says, rounding on you both, and he’s leaning right up close, eyes narrowed. “I don’t need your type telling me what to do in my business, do you understand?”

Bette is silent. There’s a pause, and then she smiles at him, her sweetest smile, and you just hang on for the ride. “I do understand,” she says. “Now, why don’t you get out of my face before I seduce one of your fucking wives and introduce her to progressive fucking gender roles, okay?”

He backs off. You groan. You try to leave a tip because you have a complex about that shit, but Bette is sliding the coins off the counter and into her fist before stalking back to the car.

“Really sorry,” you say over your shoulder, but Bette’s pulling you out of the diner.

“No, we’re not,” she calls, and tosses the money into the dust of the parking lot.

  
  
  
  


 

 

Bette should be getting ready for New York. She tells you this a number of times, not to make you guilty but because it’s on her mind. She’s on her phone once you hit service, and she’s sending emails, apologizing between things she was supposed to have already done. You spread out in the back of the car, imagine a number of scenarios where your car hadn’t broken down.

You stop in a town and it sticks to you. Maybe it’s still the desert and something about it sings. Maybe there are trees and mountains, maybe it reminds you of the home Shae used to talk about. You answer the Help Wanted sign. Maybe it’s a bartender. Maybe it’s for hair. Maybe it’s someone wanting manual labor and they take one look at your skinny ass and just laugh you out of there. You stay for months, and then the months become years. You get a grey hair. You live quietly. You learn something, maybe about yourself, maybe about operating heavy machinery, maybe about the world. You choose to keep no intimate company. You feel satisfied from things like sunsets, back porches, the sound of an animal that starts to return to your property and let you see it vulnerable.

And one day she walks in to that place where you work. The bar you manage now, the salon you own, the barn where you have to crawl down from the hayloft like a kid. And she looks you up and down, you see that she’s older and there’s been things between you now bigger than humans, bigger than universes, but she smiles at you and you hold out your hand and you laugh and she--

“Shane.” Bette’s coming out of the gas station with water, a bag of food. She’s got an orange she’s peeling, but she tosses you the rest and you see it’s junk food, candy, shit she would never let Angelica anywhere near. “This needs to be gone by the time we get on the plane, understood?”

You smirk, fish out the Cheetos. “Tina still got you guys vegan?”

Bette gives you a look. “Tina doesn’t know I can order In-N-Out to the office.”

“There’s no In-N-Out in Manhattan.”

“I’ll survive. There’s alcohol.”

  
  
  
  


 

 

Bette sleeps on the flight for all of ten minutes before she’s back to whatever her Blackberry demands. You fiddle with the built-in bar, stare at your hands, try not to stare out the window because the fact you’re rapidly returning to exactly what you had wanted to remain a past illusion is not a comforting thought.

“Oh,” Bette says, and you’re grateful for the distraction, until you’re not. “I think it’s better I tell you now than when we land.”

You stare at her, say nothing, expecting any number of unpleasant things. What you are not expecting is this:

“Carmen got in contact. Not with me, with Helena of all people.”

“Helena.”

“Apparently Helena tried to book her before...everything with Jenny, and Carmen hadn’t responded but then she did, and she had heard about everything. She wished she had been able to go to the burial.”

“Huh.”

“She wants to meet. See us again. We’re having a dinner this week, and you’re obviously coming, and I wanted you to know that she’s likely coming, too.” Bette fixes with you a look, then pushes her sunglasses onto her face. “I’m telling you this now so you won’t be ambushed with it later.”

Your mouth is dry. You curl your fingers into your palm, uncurl, curl, uncurl. “Yeah, no, got it. Appreciate it.” You laugh, chew on your thumb. “Crazy.”

  
  
  
  


 

 

Another Peabody car takes you home. LA is laid out for you, shifting in the window where your shoulder is slumped, winking, welcoming, all the same, a girl you’ve known for years who still manages to have your number. You love her. You hate her. You’re never going to leave her, unless she kicks you out first.

Bette touches your arm when the car slows down, lowers her sunglasses. “You know you can talk to us. Before you run off into the sunset again, understand?”

“Yeah.” You drop into a hug, one arm all the way around her. “Thanks. And thanks for…” You pull away, gesture to the inside of the car. “All this.”

Bette’s smile slides into a crooked arrangement. “You can thank the very deep Peabody family pockets for that.”

“Yeah, but you came.”

Her expression changes, knowing, and she nods. Says nothing else. Nothing else is necessary.

The understanding between you remains.

  
  
  
  


 

 

You take a few days to get used to your house again. Not that you do get used to it, but you adjust, you _allow_ yourself to be there. You allow yourself to open up the door to caller after caller - Alice, vacillating between crying and chastising, Tasha wincing in her wake; Helena, the champagne you sent her under her arm, returned without ceremony, deemed unnecessary even after the note with it had said you could never be thankful enough, waving her hands to exit whatever feelings of guilt you were carrying; Tina and Kit and Bette again, guessing that having a toddler around might help with distractions, guessing correctly.

But you’re aware that this grief you’re feeling is different than theirs, and they might glance at the closed bedroom door without saying anything, but you know the way their expression shifts isn’t necessarily about the loss. You know it was complicated. You know, in some way, they’re comforting you because they’re guilty about not knowing how to comfort themselves, not feeling that it’s even necessary.

You allow these people into your life because you love them. You embrace them before they leave for the evening, even though Alice thinks she and Tasha should stay over, even though Tina can take Angelica home but Bette says she’s happy to stay on the couch. This is what you ran away from the first time, you remind yourself. This is what you were rejecting. It was all there, easy and willing and so full of light, and you put your head down and ran away.

You close the door behind them, you face the silence of the house again. You turn on CDs to keep something out. You find an unlabeled one in a pile, it ends up played with the rest, and you know the mix, you know who made it, and you don’t fight it.

You allow yourself to remember. You allow her to come back into your dreams. You wait for Friday.

  
  
  
  


 

 

“Bette told you?” Alice tightens her shoelaces again, seemingly for the third time since you began jogging.

“Yeah, she wanted to give me a heads up.” You wait for her, pull your hat lower over your head, breathe out in honor of every cigarette that sacrificed itself in service of your weakened lungs. “What’d you hear?”

“That she’s coming.” Alice yanks her shorts back into place, makes a face as she tries to adjust her sunglasses, continuing to stall before having to exercise again. “I don’t know, she talked to Helena first, which, you know, they barely knew each other or whatever.”

“Helena paid for her family to come to the...”

Alice chooses this time as the moment to take off jogging again, bless her. “Right, right. I just mean, Jenny published our bogus lives in a book, including hers for a chapter, and we didn’t hear boo. Jenny makes a movie about it, we still don’t hear boo. She waited a while to pop back up and build a bridge again, you know?”

You smile in spite of yourself - both your avoidance of these thoughts, and your inability to properly breathe right now. “Carmen isn’t the forgiving type.”

“So what, we were all burned out? Like the fucking mafia? I mean, I saw her at one party after that whole Canadian situation, and she just about evaporated when I waved at her.”

“You didn’t tell me about that.”

“She just stopped going to clubs, she stopped going to girl parties, she completely divorced herself from the entire scene, over what? A wedding? Girl, get over yourself. Once marriage is legal here, divorce is going to be the next hot thing. Everyone’s going to wish they faced marital ruin so they had some kind of social capital. I’m just saying, never talking to any of us again seemed like a lot. Very extreme.”

“That’s how she is.”

Alice attempts to elbow you in the side while jogging, causing her to nearly stumble. “So you gonna dress up?”

“No.”

“I’m gonna be honest with you, I’m excited.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what happens! We don’t get this kind of opportunity very often in the community. This level of drama is usually saved for the boys.”

“That’s bullshit. Total bullshit.”

“I know, I know. Fucking your ex is the lesbian bread and butter.”

“No one is fucking her, Alice.”

“Someone is. You think she’s been keeping her legs crossed all this time?” She catches your expression, coughs, inspiring another slight stumble. “What? I’m just saying. We both know a girl like that doesn’t stay single for long.”

“Like what?”

“A _hot_ one, Shane. Jesus, don’t play dumb now. She’s been catnip for every butch in southern California for more than a minute. So, that’s what I’m saying. If it happens tomorrow night, I’ll just act surprised for your benefit. But inside, none of me is surprised. None of me.”

“That isn’t happening.”

“Really? You’re going to see your ex of however many years who, I mean, is arguably the love of your life, right?”

“Don’t.”

“And you’re not going to try to impress her, or win her back, or just acknowledge the moment?”

“Nope.”

“You are so full of shit.”

“It is what it is. I’m going to respect her. I’m going to respect what happened. I fucked up, remember?”

Alice stops running again, smirking at you. “You going to wear a suit?”

“No, Alice. I am not going to wear a suit.”

“So what then? Boxers? A dirty t-shirt?”

“A clean t-shirt.”

“White, obviously. With nips showing. How else will she know she has your attention?”

You give her a look, point a finger in her face while you catch your breath, but shit, shit, you know. You know all about it.

  
  
  
  


 

 

Bette raises an eyebrow at your tie. Tina’s in the kitchen, leans back to see for herself, and gives Bette a small smile, turns back to the food.

“Tell me there’s not a corsage somewhere,” Bette says.

You roll your eyes, hand her the case of Modelo no one’s going to drink until the curated wine has been gone through. “I’m not allowed to clean up for my friends?”

You follow her into the garden. Typical Porter affair, all laid out, themed, organized and presented with the precision of an imperial attendance. Bette’s beaming whether she knows it or not, taking in your reaction to it all, and hell, you’re always genuinely impressed.

“Looks nice.”

She gives you another one-over, this time so there’s no way you’d miss it. “So do you. I was honestly afraid you’d show up with roses.

“Even if that was even remotely what tonight was about, you know that’s never been my move.”

She leans closer, whispers in your ear. “She’s not here yet.”

“I don’t care,” you say, making a face, lying through your teeth. “It’s none of my business.”

Bette just shakes her head, but she’s smirking, keeping herself out of this situation because she knows better than to so much as drop a toe in your messes, but this won’t be a mess, you never want a mess again, you’ll banish every mess from now on if the lights stay on and this dinner tastes as good as you think it will and she’ll, she’ll have to--

Everyone’s eyeing you. Could be about...but it’s not, it’s about the person who isn’t here yet. Kit grabbing your elbow, _Girl, if you don’t sit next to me_ , and Alice mouthing _Fancy tie_ while gesturing to your neck and contorting her face into a ridiculous expression, Tasha apologizing with her eyes for all of it.

You’re finishing your wine and before you know it, Bette’s expecting everyone to take their seats, and then the doorbell.

Tina gives you a quick look before going inside. Everyone is giving you a look. You shrug, midway through your gulp of sauvignon blanc. “What?”

Alice gestures for you to adjust your tie. You ignore her. None of it seems real yet; it’s silly, somehow, the mere idea that Carmen would just be showing up tonight, that you might be looking her in the face soon, it’s laughable. It can’t be real. It can’t really be--

The laugh. Her voice, shit. You pause, holding your glass by the stem over your middle, staring into its depths. This is what exists now, this wine and that voice. But she’s coming out to the patio, you can hear those steps and watch everyone else react, and eventually you’re going to have to turn and look at her, too.

“Hey,” she says, but it’s not to you. It’s to the rest of the group, her eyes falling on everyone else, nodding, smiling, and you make your inventory: same face, same smile, longer hair but it’s pulled back, no hoops but the earrings are still big and bright, same hands, same shoulders that you know the taste of, same mouth, same, same, same. Same sincerity when she comes up to each person. Same genuine look of sympathy, of joy, of everything at once because that’s how she’s always been, so much so quickly.

Everyone’s greeting her, getting closer for some kind of physical acknowledgment, a touch on the arm, and then hugs once Kit breaks the pattern, calls her _babygirl_ like she used to and wraps her in her arms, and you stand there, you’re still holding that wine like an idiot and waiting like someone’s going to tell you where your foot goes next. You’re here. You’re ready to be split in two. You’re ready to be irreparably damaged. You’re here and she’s here, too.

“Shane,” she says. You meet her eye. You cannot make anything of her expression, how it tilts when you’re looking at her, because you know it never tilted like this before. You tilt with it.

“Hi,” you say. “Hey.” She holds out her arms, pulls you in before you can lift your own to meet her, and you let yourself be embraced without letting yourself feel it. Quite frankly, you refuse to feel it, because you know that’d kill you.

“I’m sorry about Jenny,” she says into your neck, starts, and you shake your head, close your eyes as you are held.

“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” you hear in your ear. Your hair moves because her mouth has moved it. You swallow.

“Sorry about that, had to park a block over,” someone’s saying. Your eyes are closed, you feel her grip release, and then you’re free. She steps past you. You open your eyes. There’s a woman coming outside. She is wearing a tie.

Bette’s stepping between you and the rest of this scene, and you can see her eye twitching. This is unplanned.

“Bette, I hope you don’t mind,” Carmen says, and you realize this is the one small revenge of Carmen de la Pica Morales against the friends of the woman who humiliated her, because Carmen de la Pica Morales knows damn well that you do not bring an unplanned plus-one to a Bette Porter-planned dinner.

“Oh,” Bette says. “Well, we can try to make room.” And she’s smiling, but it isn’t pretending to be sincere, and it isn’t even remotely close to accommodating. She and Tina share a secret look over Carmen’s shoulder, and you’re grateful for it, in some small way, while you’re also tugged by a strange and familiar urge to defend Carmen, to make room for some woman she brought, to make her life easier somehow.

“This is Rocky,” Carmen says, bringing the woman with the tie forward, leading her by her elbow, a gesture you know well because of all the times she led you the same way. The woman’s hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail, dull brown, and you see her neck is bare. Of course it is, why would you even think it wouldn’t be? You’re holding your breath without realizing it. “My partner.”

Alice gives you a look, then turns back to Carmen, the Alice-smile too clear. “Rocky. Wow. Nice to meet you.”

The woman named Rocky smiles quickly, sincerely, and she has a firm, intense handshake. “Heard a lot about you guys. Great to put faces to the names.

“All good things, I hope,” Tina says, which is the wrong thing, but, you know.

“Fat fucking chance,” Alice whispers into her glass of wine.

  
  
  
  


 

 

It gets easier. Well, not easier. You still have trouble staring at her for more than a few seconds - like the sun, it starts to hurt, and you’re afraid of what it’ll do in the long run. People go blind, don’t they, or was that just what some adult told you a long time ago, to save you from yourself? You keep realizing that you haven’t breathed for a while, and then force yourself to inhale. And you see when you all finally assemble for dinner, when you pass behind her to take your seat, the familiar tattoo at the base of her neck, the one that matches yours. She glances up at you over her shoulder, only for a second, just long enough for her to see where your gaze has fallen and meet your eye, and then she’s turning back to Helena, continuing the conversation. Your phone hums in your pocket. Alice won’t stop texting you “YO ADRIAN!”.

Bette has had to rearrange the seating last minute, and now Rocky is perched on the corner of the table, wedged unceremoniously between Carmen and Helena. You never look at Rocky. You have gathered that Rocky is not looking at you either. If she was putting faces to names, you can imagine the moment when she settled on yours.

The food is the usual level of perfect. Bette pulls the conversation in the right directions, never skipping the opportunity to give the one corner of the table a particular type of smile, and you can concentrate on Alice kicking your leg endlessly, Tasha trying to be nice to everyone, Kit wanting to know all about Rocky for some reason.

The wine loosens things up. It’s evident to regular attendees that the wine is flowing much faster this evening, and Bette’s pushing new bottles on the table like she’s got an agenda. You can only imagine the hand squeezing going on under the table between her and Tina, their usual types of silent communications.

“So Shane,” you hear Rocky say, and you look up from your plate, trying not to react when you see the woman looking at you. “Carmen says you do hair.”

Alice, four glasses of top shelf wine in and still not clearing her plate at the same rate, snorts. “Uh, yeah, you could say Shane does hair. You could say Ellen has a little show, too.”

“Shane’s a very successful stylist,” Helena clarifies, and you hate when people describe it this way, but you’d probably hate whatever anyone told Rocky you do, because you’ve heard her going on about her marketing gig and her loft and you already know where you sit here. Not that it’s a competition. But you know Carmen’s staring elsewhere, sipping her drink like you remember her doing when she wanted to avoid the conversation, and you shrug.

“I do hair,” you say.

“Shane’s a big deal,” Kit adds. “Celebrities are banging down the door for her. Tell her about when you did Cate Blanchett’s hair, Shane. Three times she’s done her hair, we thought they had a thing with how much she was having her over.”

Rocky smiles but it’s the kind you can’t read, nods. “That’s very cool. Well, sounds like a great fit for you.”

Carmen is pushing her food with her fork. You watch her, and Rocky is watching you watch her, and then you’re looking at Rocky, and then Carmen is looking at you, and you stand up. The sudden gesture has a few occupants of the table starting.

“I’ll be right back,” you say. “Excuse me.”

  
  
  
  


 

 

“Holy shit,” Alice is saying, leaning against the car in the driveway while you smoke, a new glass of wine in her hand. “Can you believe her? I mean, what the _fuck_?”

You inhale, closing your eyes. “It’s fine.”

“First of all, she clearly has a type. I mean, looks-wise. Personality-wise, I’m pretty sure you’re not a sociopath, so I guess she’s branching out.”

“Rocky’s not a sociopath.”

“ _Shane, you do hair?_ What an asshole. Oh, and her name is _Rocky_. Is she a scrappy little man? Rocky. God.”

“My name is Shane.”

“See what I mean? A type. But beyond that, the fuck? Also, I know I haven’t seen that girl around. Ponytail dykes with strong forearms don’t just fall out of the sky. I would have noticed the fucking name Rocky on the fucking chart, right? Why has she been hiding? It’s suspicious, it’s fucking suspicious.”

You shake your head, give her a look. “Isn’t it going to be strange that you followed me out for my smoke?”

“Oh, Bette said she’s got to get dessert ready. Made everyone get up and move inside so it’d be less weird that you ducked out.” She jabs a finger with the same hand holding her wine. “Don’t say we don’t ever cover for you.”

  
  
  


 

 

People start getting drunk. That’s more or less what always happens, but now it’s amplified and you feel your own face getting hot and slow and your tongue keeps running over your teeth when you look over at her, more openly now because the wine hit the way it was meant to, the way Bette probably strategically intended, and you feel your mouth dry up every time she looks back.

You go light another cigarette in the driveway. You want to kneel down because you feel like you’re swimming, and it’s not the alcohol. It’s the way you’re already returning to her in your mind. It’s the woman walking towards you now, away from the house and the muffled sound of the dinner party and the bossa nova Bette thinks the neighborhood will never mind hearing.

“You never quit?”

Carmen is reaching out her hand and you slip the cigarette between her fingers like it’s the most natural thing in the universe. “No,” you say, laugh after you exhale, let it sit there between you. “You thought I would?”

“I don’t know.” She blows smoke towards you. You could drink it if you wanted to, open your mouth and feel sated. “Things change over time. It’s been a while.”

“No shit.”

She looks at you sideways. Why does the whole world live in her eyes tonight? You glorious idiot, choking down smoke and wishing she’d release you from it all. “How is this?”

“How’s what?”

“Seeing me again.”

What does she want you to say? You’ve got answers, sure. You could communicate them without words if you wanted to: show her the way the cigarette trembles between your knuckles, show her the surface of your tongue where it’s dry, press her ear to your chest to hear your heart screaming. “It’s something.”

“Not what you expected.”

You shrug. So, what were you expecting? Do you even know? Dreams are dreams, after all. “Guess not.” You grin for a second. “To be honest, I kind of thought the next time we ran into each other, you’d try to kill me or something.”

“I thought my cousins almost did.”

“They told you about that?”

“My entire block knew about that.”

“So they all hate me now, huh?”

She gives you a look, long and focused and only slightly playful, run through with the seriousness you remember, the intensity that makes you want to hand yourself over, just give up right now. She blinks. “I’m doing great, thanks for asking.”

You blush, embarrassed. “You look good, too. Like you’re doing good, I mean.”

“I am. I’m really happy.”

“I’m sorry if me being here has any impact on that.”

“No, it wouldn’t have any impact at all.”

You’re disappointed to hear that, because you’re a mess. “Okay.”

“I don’t hate you, Shane. I did. I spent a lot of energy in a short amount of time hating every fuckign inch of you for it, but honestly, when that feeling passed, I just felt sorry for you.”

And now the disappointment is shame, and you agree with her, just like Jenny sometimes did, and the others sometimes do, and you remember Bette saying that once, some half-drunk conversation on the porch a year or two ago: fucking up doesn’t reflect on the person you’re hurting - it just makes yourself look more pathetic.

“She seems nice.”

Her whole mouth spreads into a grin, thumb between her teeth as she looks away from you, laughing. “Don’t even.”

“I mean it. You deserve somebody good. You deserve...everything, you know?” You feel stupid, you can’t help it. “She’s great. I’m really happy for you.”

Carmen fixes you with a look all over again. You think you just felt your whole chest crack in two. “Cut the bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit.”

She rolls her eyes, still smirking, still that smile that always made you want to bury yourself somewhere deep in her where there’s no chance of getting back out. “I’ll give you her number if you want. You two can be best friends.”

You blush, focus on your cigarette. “Fine, fine. I don’t want to be her friend.”

“Good,” Carmen says, and she’s not looking at you when she says it. “Is it wrong of me to want you to not like her?”

You blink. She grins, chuckles to herself. Everything in your chest flops out onto the ground. “No,” you say, nothing else to it.

“Do you want to get coffee?”

You laugh, and once the sound leaves you, you’re afraid it might have been too harsh. But like so many things, it’s too late to take back. “Is that what we’re doing?”

Carmen is laughing, too, but it’s not harsh, it’s not cruel. It sounds good. It _feels_ good. “What?”

“I don’t know. You’re allowed to not want anything to do with me. I mean, you’re entitled to that, bare minimum.”

“Oh, I’m aware.” There’s a pause, a shift in her face as she’s studying you, and you’re naked right now, you might as well slip out of these clothes and just twirl for her, breeze on your nethers. “Are you really that opposed to it?”

Your throat’s hurting for no good reason. “Getting to know each other again?”

She rolls her eyes. “You really think there’s something we don’t already know.”

“What, you haven’t changed?”

“I’ve adjusted. Adjusting doesn’t make me a different person.”

“Well, I’ve changed.” You take a deep breath, your voice softer this time. “I have.”

“You better have, Shane McCutcheon.” She brushes your wrist with her fingers, grins at you the way she always did, like she does in your dreams now. “I’m wasting my time if you haven’t. You’d be wasting yours, too.”

 

 

 

 

 


	2. salt

 

 

 

 

 

You don’t get coffee at The Planet. You avoid WeHo altogether, telling her to pick the place, and she says she wants you to come out to Manhattan Beach.

“You living out there?” you say into your phone, half of you in the attic, pulling down boxes.

“Sort of,” she says on the other end, and you can hear the sound of the ocean behind her. You forget it’s there sometimes. You get away from the water for an hour and you think Los Angeles is on its own planet, you know? Wherever it is the sun sets, that’s the edge of the whole world, and there’s nothing good that can come from you wandering in that direction. But for her? Sure. “There’s a decent spot around the corner from me. We can walk on the beach.”

“A walk on the beach, huh?” There is a box with Jenny’s name on it. When you drop it, empty, onto the floor underneath you, you do not take note of the hollow sound, the vacancy ringing through the house. 

“Don’t get any ideas.” You can hear her smile through the phone.

“Wouldn’t dare.”

In Jenny’s room, the sheets are folded on the mattress where you’ve left them, her clothes left behind by her parents in bags under the bed. You pick up the first shirt, drop it into the first box. You give yourself an hour, then you let yourself leave the room and close the door behind you. You can do it a day at a time. You can do it.

A bird hits the kitchen window around dinnertime. You go out to check if it’s stunned, lying in the sand under the cacti and the little flowers you never could get to grow, but it’s already gone.

“Okay, Jenny,” you say, going back inside to get a beer from the fridge. “I hear you. I’m going.”

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

She cancels an hour before you’re supposed to meet. You don’t know why you’re not surprised. What she doesn’t know is that you’re already in town, walking the pier in between the hourly shift of crowds, watching the ocean turn from grey to green to frothy white as it slaps the shore, rolls over for the privilege of the impact.

“It’s cool,” you say, barely able to hear her over the water, the roar of the helicopters running up and down the coast. 

“I’m so sorry,” she’s saying, and you think you can hear someone in the background, the sound of an engine starting. “I’m not trying to make a point, I promise. Just in case you were thinking that this was all a set-up.”

“Why would I think that?”

“Bailing last minute? Not showing up?” There’s a tone to her voice - she’s playing, but there’s an edge, too, and she wants to see how far she can go. “Any of that familiar?”

You chuckle, nod to yourself. “Yeah, I deserve that.”

“Well, I’m not doing it on purpose, honest. Something came up. Can I call you later?”

“That’s fine,” you say. It is.

You walk on the beach for a while. You think about the sand here, the way it keeps trying to claim your feet, making it hard to walk as you sink from heel to toe, and you think about the sand in the desert, packed and dusty and staining your black jeans if you scuffed too much.

You think you’re seeing signs everywhere now. You might be going crazy. A seagull circles too close, and you think it’s Jenny, spiraling erratically, spinning away from the group. The dark rope of kelp washed up on shore - the ocean herself lost these things, why is she showing them to you now? What does she want from you?

Fuck, you’re probably going crazy.

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

She calls when you’re about to go to sleep. You sit on the edge of the unmade bed, work a corner of the sheets between your fingers.

“Is this too late?” she asks, and it’s a question that could mean a lot more than what she intends. No, you want to say, to answer one meaning. No, you want to say, to answer the other. “Or for you, maybe it’s too early. I don’t want to disturb you if you have plans.”

“No plans,” you say. “Just going to bed eventually.”

“Alone?” She shouldn’t ask you that. You bite your lip because she does anyway. “I don’t want to get in the way of your night.”

“I said I don’t have plans.”

“Right.” A rustling on the other end, the sound of liquid pouring into a glass. “Sorry about today. It’s been a weird week.”

“Yeah, I get that. It’s been weird for me, too.” You take a deep breath. “I bet I factor into that weirdness somehow.”

“I’d assume the same for you.”

“No, seeing you after all these years was totally normal.”

“Oh.”

“I’m kidding.”

A relieved laugh on her end. “Good.”

“Is it?”

“Sure.” You hear her breathing, hear the coolness of the moment of silence, taste it a little. “How are you doing?”

“Can’t complain.”

“I mean after Jenny.”

“You already asked me that.”

“I’m asking again.”

“I’m fine,” you say, eyes to the hallway, dark and silent, knowing what’s beyond that. “The house is quiet, but, you know, that’s just how it is.”

“You don’t have to be fine.”

A sharp intake of breath - you can’t help yourself. “I mean, I do.”

“Kit told me about you taking off--”

“Which time?”

A pause. She doesn’t want to take the bait, even if you’re holding out your wrist, asking for the slap. “She said you went east.”

“I drove into the desert.”

“What were you doing?”

Dreaming of you. Dreaming of Jenny. Trying to make sense of myself. Erasing pieces and failing. Departing from something. “I just drove.”

“Did it help?”

“I guess,” you say. You think about it, but the only thing in your mind is the way she looked at you in your dreams, turning herself over, stalking away. “It’s not like anyone can fix everything. Nothing’s going to ever help all the way, you know?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know.” She’s quiet, you’re quiet. You wait for her. You can feel it, whatever she’s holding there. “You should have called me,” she says.

“No,” you say, but you want her to correct you. She does.

“I know we weren’t talking. I know you thought I hated you. But you could have called me. You should have told me.”

“I don’t know what that would have done. She’s still be dead. I would still run away.”

“Maybe this time, if you’d asked, I would have come, too.”

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

“Who are you fucking?”

You raise an eyebrow over your drink. Alice is practically screaming over the thump of the bass in the club she dragged you to, fresh off a fight with Tasha, eager to revisit something you two haven’t done in a while. You’re still nursing the same thing you came in with. The half-naked girl previously rubbing against you while you tried to focus on your drink has become a memory in the crowd, and your attempts to leave keep failing. Alice yanks on your arm, dragging you back towards the music.

“What?”

“You heard me,” she says, a buzzed hand on your shoulder. “Who is this big secret you’re keeping?”

Can she see you blush if the lights are pink in here?

“I’m not fucking anybody,” you say, which is true.

“You’re up to something, though,” Alice says, swaying to the beat. “I know you too well. You’re hiding something and it has something to do with sex.”

“Seriously,” you say, taking a girlish sip of your whiskey. “I’m celibate. Cross my heart and hope to die straight.”

“I know you’re grieving and everything, but like, I don’t know. Own up! Be real with me! You can fuck whoever you want, Shane. I’m not going to judge whoever you’re having therapeutic sex with, okay?”

You make a face. “I’m aware.”

“Is it Cherie Jaffe? Tell me you’re not back on that garbage.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do I know her? Is it someone I hate? Is that what this is about?”

“I told you, I’m not having sex with anyone.”

“Bullshit,” she says, narrowing her eyes at you, and then throwing up her hands as Robyn comes on. “We need to do more shots.”

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

“Hello?”

A sharp intake of breath on the other side of the phone. You know it’s hers.

“Shit,” she says, and then repeats it. “Shit. Sorry, I was trying to call someone else.”

“Oh,” you say. “Hey,” you say.

“Hey,” which comes with a laugh. “So I was trying to call this girl named Sadie, and you’re right next to each other in my contacts--”

She’s added you to her contacts. Or, did you never leave? Were you always there? Did her thumb linger over your name on certain nights at certain hours? Has she stopped herself from pressing delete when she’s reminded that you’re there? Did she say your name to herself when she was alone? Does she still say it now?

“Can I help?”

“With what? What I was trying to call Sadie for?”

“Sure. I’m helpful, right?”

She snorts. “Not unless you borrowed a mixer from me last week. If so, drop it off at my house tonight, okay? You’re three days late returning it.”

You’re grinning. You nearly stumble over a eucalyptus root grinning this hard. “My bad.” 

“What are you up to?”

“Besides hoarding mixers? I’m walking.”

“To where?”

“From where, actually. From coffee.”

“The Planet?”

“There’s a new place that’s closer, actually. Full of gay men instead of gay women, but, you know. Gay coffee.”

“That’s West Hollywood,” she says, sighing. “That sounds better for you anyway.”

“Coffee places full of gay men?”

“Easier for you to avoid exes.”

“Is that why you don’t come to this neighborhood anymore?”

A pause on her end. You think you hear her breathing, or maybe that’s just you wishing too hard.

“I have my reasons,” she says finally, and you can’t read her tone over the phone. You need to see her face, her eyes. You always need to see her eyes.

“You disappeared,” you say.

“So did you.”

“I came back eventually,” you say, somehow.

“Not to me.”

“I tried,” you say, and you could smack yourself in the face for it.

“No,” she says, cooler this time, but she’s laughing, too, somehow, like this is something you can just talk about now when it’s making your chest ache. Does it hurt her, too? “You didn’t try hard enough.”

Here is what you want to ask: Was it the timing, or was it me? What would have been enough? What should I have done? What can I do now?

But here is what you do say:

“Sadie’s going to run off with that mixer if you don’t call her.”

Another quick run of laughter, like something from a song. “You’re her accomplice now.”

“Better track her down before it’s too late.”

“It was good talking to you, Shane.”

“Yeah?”

But she’s hung up. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

You’re watching Angelica for the afternoon, Bette and Tina off making New York arrangements with their movers. Kit’s making you both lunch, and you’re feeding Angelica pieces of a sliced apple, letting her gnaw them when she remembers to look up from playing. 

Carmen calls. “Are you free to talk?”

“Sure,” you say, knowing Kit’s glancing at you, watching you pick up Angelica and walk out into the back. “Sure, I can talk.”

“We still haven’t rescheduled our coffee date.”

You shouldn’t react to the use of the word date - it means so many things, and you’re an idiot for thinking of the one thing it clearly isn’t - but you do. “Right,” you say. “Well, my schedule’s pretty open.”

“Can you do Friday morning?”

Of course you can, but you pause. “I think so.”

“Perfect. I’ll send you the address.”

“Cool.” You breathe, hitch Angelica farther up on your hip while she plays with your hair. “What are you doing?”

“I’m in the studio.” The sound of something clicking on her end, a door maybe. “How about you?”

“Babysitting Angelica.”

You can almost hear her nose scrunch from her smile. “Very cute.”

“I’m pretty sure Bette and Tina think they can pawn off their toddler as therapy.”

“And is it working?”

You smirk, Angelica’s fingers firmly knotted in your hair. “Yeah, I think so.”

“You were always good with kids.”

Kit raises an eyebrow when you come back inside, slides a grilled cheese onto your plate. “What’s her name?”

“It’s just Carmen,” you say, not making eye contact when you set Angelica back down, not even looking up when you take a bite. 

“Just Carmen,” Kit repeats, but the corners of her mouth have tilted, and you can’t miss the way her tone changes, lightens up like someone’s poured something sweeter into the room.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

The place is small, beach-themed and slightly bougie like everything around here. Locals in flip-flops putter quietly around you. It’s too early for tourists, but people here seem to dress like they’re only passing through and soaking it all up. Everyone’s drink involves some kind of ghee butter or hemp oil or flax. You ask for an americano while you wait for a sign of her, until you feel her hand circling her arm, coming up behind you, swinging you back around like always.

“Hey,” she says, and you blush, you just keep blushing like some foolish kid who doesn’t know when to quit while she’s ahead. Doesn’t know she’s already two feet into the trap. “You found it.”

“Yeah,” you say, nodding. You try to come up with something to detach yourself from how much it thrills you to be touched by her. “Parking’s shit around here, huh?”

“Worse on the weekends.” It’s a mundane way to start the conversation and yet she’s lit up like before, her smile is so huge and genuine and you want to keep it that way.

“You live around the corner?”

“Rocky does. She loves to surf.”

“Ah,” you say, burying the rest of your statement in the americano. Carmen smirks at you, stirring extra sugar into her latte, watching you while she does it. “Sporty, huh. Explains the, uh…” You flex one arm pathetically. “Muscles.”

“Sure.” 

“We still taking that walk on the beach? Or are you going to give me a neighborhood tour?”

“You haven’t been out here before?”

You shrug. “I don’t surf and I don’t run, and I don’t have a family, so no. Not really.”

“Yeah, it’s family-oriented out here,” she says, and there’s something to her voice, you could pluck it right out, it’s so tangible, but then she’s smiling again and pulling you outside, leading you along on the leash she’s always had tied to your middle.

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

The beach isn’t too busy this early, no crowds or a steady line up the hill. Sometimes you can’t hear her because of the waves. You just stare at her, watch her talk, wish you’d done this years ago. You don’t even mind that it’s impossible to walk in the sand. You don’t mind that you keep tripping, catching yourself, rolling your ankles back and forth. An hour goes by, then two. She stops suddenly, hands on her hips, and looks at you.

“Rocky wants a kid,” she says, and you almost don’t hear her, but she says it again when you sit down in the sand, pulling up her knees like she always used to. “I mean, she wants three kids, and we have to start now to stay on schedule. She won't let up about it, to be honest.”

“Is that what you want?” 

She looks at you, and her brows tilt and her mouth is half-open, you could kiss her if you leaned in a bit but she’s talking about carrying someone else’s child and you still want to kiss her, you’re an idiot. You’re deep in that ditch and you want someone to finish the job.

“I don’t know,” she finally says. “I always wanted kids eventually. I don’t even mind a big family.”

“Yeah,” you say, pushing sand with your feet. “I remember.”

“Right,” she says, quieter, so quiet you almost can’t hear her. “I thought I’d know when I was ready. I’ve been producing a lot of music, did I tell you? It’s a huge drain on my time, but I love it. I really love it. And I don’t want to live here, but she doesn’t want to move, so we’d have to do it all here in this little beach house, and it’s small, you know? It’s too small.”

“Kinda sounds like excuses,” you say, too late to take it back, too stupid to care for the minute. She wasn’t expecting that, you can tell by how she glances at you, her cheeks blooming too quickly, and her eyes flicker, fall on you in an old way.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“It’s none of my business, though,” you add, slightly embarrassed, slightly unashamed and not embarrassed at all. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, laughs insincerely. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. God, this is typical, right? Just another lesbian, asking my ex if I should have a family with my partner.”

“It’s okay.”

“Can I be honest?”

Your mouth is dry. You could eat this sand and it’d taste the same. “Sure.”

“I wanted you to say it was a bad idea. You know that? I wanted you to tell me it was a mistake, and that I shouldn’t do it.”

You don’t say anything. She makes a noise, covers her face. 

“God, I’m so sorry,” she says. “I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“Like what?”

“I thought talking to you again would be...I don’t know, I thought it would be simple. No big deal.”

“It’s hard?”

“It’s not hard,” she says. “No, it’s not hard at all. It’s...it’s been so fucking easy.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I get it.”

“Everything with Rocky has been so good. You have no idea how good it’s been.”

“I’m really glad for you. Honest, I’m really happy. I don’t want to fuck that up.”

“And then I thought we could get coffee because I wouldn’t care, it’d be like anyone else, but you’re not anyone else, you’re  _ Shane _ , and this is really fucking with me.” She lifts her head up, not looking at you. “We keep talking and every time we talk on the phone, I just know what it is, and I don’t know what to do with it. I didn’t think it would feel like this.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, touching her shoulder, then making yourself pull your hand away. “I don’t want you to feel terrible.”

“I don’t feel terrible. I feel like…” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m really sorry, this was so stupid of me. Just forget I said all of this. The thing with Rocky, all of it. Okay?”

“Sure,” you say, aware you’re shaking a little. “That’s fine.”

It isn’t, or perhaps it is. Perhaps you can’t say anymore because you have no idea how to gauge ‘fine’, and it hasn’t meant a thing to you for a long time.

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

She walks you back to the jeep. 

“This was good,” she says, and maybe it’s a half-lie. She kisses your cheek, and you lean into the sudden wetness of her lips. Just as quick as they came, they are gone. You step back to see the lost strands of hair that have been curled by the salt air, and you could push them behind her ear and feel the way she might tremble at your touch, you could do all that if only you were brave enough. Or stupid enough. Both, maybe. You are always somehow both and neither. 

“Thanks for the walk.”   


“Sure,” she says, watching you get into the driver’s seat, standing in the street with her shoes in her hands, her feet still tracing sand. “I’m sorry, again, honestly. ”

“Don’t,” you say. “You don’t need to apologize to me.”

“I do.”

“No, you really don’t. I owed you one, right?”

“You don’t owe me anything, Shane.”

You lean out of the jeep, close to her again. “Sure I do.”

“No,” she says, both hands on your face, your breath gone, your chest a sink. “Stop.”

Then she’s gone, because you both know that shouldn’t have happened, you both must know, and you are leaning back into the seat, feet on the pedals, car off, no idea where you go next. It must be over now, for good this time.

You think this is probably not going to happen again. You pull onto Sepulveda, and you know you could stay on this and keep driving, and it would only take a few turns to drag you out of the city, keep north this time, find the mountains lifting their shoulders from the desert, find the forests that make you feel insignificant, drive until you find a place where rain falls from the sky.

It could be easy, you think, to never return to the bungalow and its silence. But you’d be fooling yourself, because it wasn’t easy when you drove west, and it wasn’t easy when you sulked back to Cherie Jaffe in the wake of Canada, and it wasn’t easy when you got up time and time again from the beds you wanted to forget, and hoped the wreckage behind you would blow away like so much ash.

You get on the 405. You crawl north with the sun on your cheek. You get off at La Cienega, you drive past the hills where oil is pulled up from the earth like the past can always be resurfaced, you watch wells replaced with houses, tents along fences, the colors of Melrose, the blinding white of the blocks beyond. 

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

You don’t hear from her for nine weeks. Nine. You keep a low profile, keep your hands busy with things that don’t involve women. You fix things in the house that don’t need fixing. You drink a little, but not too much. You replace the succulents along the garage.

She calls the night of one of Bette and Tina’s dinners. You’re coming home from theirs, smoking in the driveway with wine on your breath. Your phone buzzes and you know the number - you never brought yourself to add her as a contact. You had drawn boundaries. Now you release them, throw them aside, jump.

“It’s late,” you say.

“We need to talk,” she says.

“I’m home.”

“Can I come over?”

You watch the smoke in the faint gold of the lights from the other houses. “Thought I wouldn’t hear from you again. Thought the beach was the end of it.”

“It’s over.”

Your mouth is dry. “Yeah?”

“Last week.” A long sigh on her end. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Shane.”

“Maybe you need to figure that out before you come over here.”

You wait for her response. It doesn’t come. She breathes, and you can hear that, you can almost feel it on your neck, and then she hangs up.

You stay up another hour. No one knocks on the door. No one calls. You go to sleep.

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

“Carmen broke up with Rocky. Or Rocky broke up with her, I don’t know. They’re done, though.”

This, you offer up at brunch. Alice nearly drops her fork, hollandaise in the corner of her mouth. “And you know this  _ how _ ?”

“We’ve been talking.”

“With your face lips or your other lips?”

“Fuck off.”

Tasha’s focused on her coffee, shrugging, seemingly unsurprised. Bette’s working her tongue over her back teeth, eyes narrowed, grinning like a cat as she stares you down. She shares a glance with Tina.

“So what now?” she asks, because she already knows the answer. 

You work your lip with your teeth. “I don’t know,” you say. “Guess we’ll see.”

Bette raises her eyebrows, still grinning. “Guess we will, Shane.”

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

The bungalow’s quiet when you let yourself in, just as you knew it would be. “Hey Jenny,” you say, when your jacket slips from the chair to the floor. “Come on,” you say, when the bathroom door sticks. “Jenny,” you say, when there is a knock on the front door.

“Carmen,” you say, when she’s standing there.

“Carmen,” you say, when she presses her mouth to your neck and begs you to enter her.

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

“Fuck,” she says, and you watch the line of her back adjust as she sits up, sheets folding under her.

“I’m not…” you start. You’re not what? Well, you know what. Of course you do. “I don’t…”

“Fuck,” she says again, her face falling into her hands. You trace her spine with your finger, still drying and tasting of her, watch the skin around your touch turning to goosebumps, the fine hairs standing. She pushes back into your hand, falls back onto the pillow, but she’s still covering her face with her palms.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know,” she says. She lifts one hand, and she’s staring at the ceiling, naked beneath it, naked beside you.

“I’m sorry,” you start.

“No, it’s not you.” She turns, looks at you, brow furrowed the way it always does before she cries. “God, this is just...” Her voice trails off as she closes her eyes. 

“Okay,” you say, getting up to pull on a shirt, to turn the AC back on. “We won’t do it again. That’s fine.”

It’s not, but that’s fine, too.

“Fuck,” she says into her fist, sliding out of bed, fetching her panties from the other side of the room.

“Fuck,” she repeats, looking for the rest of her clothes.

“Fuck,” she repeats, grabbing at your neck, pulling you back into bed before her bra has been refastened, her mouth on yours.

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

You are driving into the desert. The moon is full and knows you well.

“There’s still time to get back to LA by sunrise,” you say, another state’s border crossed. She is staring up at the night sky in Utah.

“No,” she says. “We’re not going back tonight.”

A rattlesnake at the side of the road. A coyote in the flash of the headlights, sitting on its haunches, watching. Jenny in the rearview mirror, white dress on a black road.

“I don’t really know where I’m going,” you say, driving through another opportunity to turn around.

“We’ll find out,” she says. Carmen has her hand on your thigh. Carmen has her hand around your heart.

The desert swallows you both, an ocean.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
